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A knell is the slow, heavy sound of a bell rung because someone has died. Churches used to tell the village that way. You will hear it most in the set phrase the death knell: sometimes the real funeral bell, more often a picture — 'this is the death knell of the old factory' means that thing is finished. The word feels literary or news-like, not everyday chat. There is also a verb: bells knell. Though actually, in ordinary talk, people almost always say death knell rather than knell on its own.
喪鐘
組成Does not split. From Middle English knyllen, from Old English cnyllan ('to strike, knock, clap'), from a Germanic root about beating or pushing, going back to an old Indo-European root about squeezing or bunching.
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Knellname
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A surname.
knellverb/nɛl/
- 1
To ring a bell slowly, especially for a funeral; to toll.
- I’ll make thee sick at heart, before I leave thee, And groan, and die indeed, and be worth nothing, Not worth a blessing nor a bell to knell for thee […]
- “[…] God!—the words of the warlock are knelling in my ears!”
- 2
To signal or proclaim something (especially a death) by ringing a bell.
- Let thy friends be as the dead in doom, And build to them a final tomb; Let the starred shade that nightly falls Still celebrate their funerals, And the bell of beetle and of bee Knell their melodious memory.
- The church bells knelled the peaceful ending of the day, while the purple shades of night descended sadly and majestically on the low chain of neighbouring hills.
- 3
To summon by, or as if by, ringing a bell.
knellnoun/nɛl/
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The sound of a bell knelling; a toll (particularly one signalling a death).
- […]he is able to pierce a corselet with his eye; talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery.
- I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
- 2
A sign of the end or demise of something or someone.
- But at the close of the war there was less thought of what [Britain] had retained than of what she had lost. She was parted from her American Colonies; and at the moment such a parting seemed to be the knell of her greatness.
- At Ballymacarrett, the main line diverges to the right on its way to Newcastle. All services were discontinued on it in 1950, and the abandonment order finally rang the knell of faint hopes that services would be restored as far as Comber, […].
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。